Copyright by Central News Service

Launching the Quistconck at Hog Island

According to the report of the Carnegie Endowment the cargo loss at sea was $3,800,000,000, the total tonnage and cargo loss being $6,800,000,000. To offset the Allied loss in shipping, ship-building in the United States was rushed at topmost speed.

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In the property losses on sea, that is, to shipping and cargo, the report estimates that "the construction cost of the tonnage loss can scarcely be estimated at less than $200 a ton, and the monetary loss involved in the sinking of this 15,398,392 gross tons may, therefore, be placed at about $3,000,000,000." To this is added loss of cargo, which is estimated at $250 a ton, giving a cargo loss of $3,800,000,000, and a total tonnage and cargo loss of $6,800,000,000.

Among the indirect costs of the war, loss of production is placed at $45,000,000,000. In arriving at this figure an average of 20,000,000 men are counted as having been withdrawn from production during the whole period of the war, and their average yearly productive capacity is placed at $500. War relief is another indirect cost which totalled up to $1,000,000,000; and the loss to the neutral nations is given as $1,750,000,000.

With the total direct costs of the war amounting to $186,336,637,097 and the indirect costs to $151,612,542,560, the stupendous total of $337,946,179,657 is reached. Finally, the report says:

"The figures presented in this summary are both incomprehensible and appalling, yet even these do not take into account the effect of the war on life, human vitality, economic well-being, ethics, morality, or other phases of human relationships and activities which have been disorganized and injured. It is evident from the present disturbances in Europe that the real costs of the war cannot be measured by the direct money outlays of the belligerents during the five years of its duration, but that the very breakdown of modern economic society might be the price exacted."

THE WAR AS A PRODUCT OF HIGH PRICES

All of the great wars in European history have been followed by periods of increased production and economic expansion. Experts are convinced that the World War will prove no exception to the world's previous experience. Wars have been the principal influence that have determined the course of commodities and prices. In the Napoleonic Wars the index number rose seventy-two points in twenty years, but during the four years between 1914 and 1918 there was a rise of one hundred and eight points in four and a half years, a movement which Edgar Crammond, widely known British expert in economic and financial affairs, declared to be a movement to which there was no precedent in point of rapidity or magnitude. In an address outlined in the New York Journal of Commerce this authority estimated the direct cost of the war to the Allies as being roughly $145,000,000,000. The Central Powers had spent about $60,000,000,000. The total cost in dollars he estimated at $260,000,000,000. The upheaval caused by the war was manifested, according to the same authority, in the rise of the cost of living and in the universal increase of wages. Other economic consequences will be more gradually unfolded. Prospects of fall in the price of commodities and wages as the result of peace, he thinks, will be arrested for two reasons: First, the vast increase in the amount of paper money; second, the huge amount of public debts to the belligerents. He saw an additional psychological cause in the attitude of the laboring classes to maintain wages at a higher level than before the war and to improve the standard of living.